Past Conditional
by Saulie
Summary: Any accomplice worth his salt makes the rendezvous, for God's sake. Skewed version of chapter 99. Matt and Near talk on the phone. Whether Near gives a damn is as always anyone's guess.


**[…****You can blame Roxy for me posting this one. aslkjd. I don't know why I wrote this. I think it was "I want to make Near feel something for .02 seconds", but it could be something else entirely. Now I think it might actually have been better the way it really was, you know?**

It makes sense—too much cringing, painful sense—that Kira's cronies wouldn't know how to fire a gun. They're _lawful. _Their God kills from a distance with a fucking ballpoint pen. They've never been in a gunfight before. Neither has Matt, for the record, but—

_Shit, that _hurts!

--their aim is terrible, even though it's not quite terrible enough and there's a bullet somewhere in his shoulder and another taking a siesta near what feels like a vital organ. His head's swimming. Like those batshit people who go the English Channel. Taking the plunge. It's the same feeling. When you hit the water and it's so cold the word cold freezes and shatters halfway down your throat and you can't breathe and the numbness punches you in the stomach and it spreads like a wildfire, raging and ravaging and hungry and you think _move move move move move I've got to move I have to—_

He's got one more smokescreen.

_Not that far, not that—_

He tells them, "Go to hell."

--_bang._

Smoke. He's used to smoke. Yeah? Yeah.

All that shit about lung cancer? Not seeming so relevant.

_Shit, shit, _shit—

And it's to a mantra of _oh _shit, _oh _shit, _oh _shit that he staggers his way into the car, stomps on the gas, screeches down sidestreets—something—anything—he's got to—he doesn't know how he does it, how he loses them or how he staves off the dizziness enough because driving on six shots of Russian vodka wasn't ever anything compared to this: he has no idea. At all. But he doesn't have space for ideas. He's trying, really, to think like Mello would. Mello pulled crazy shit like this all the time, right? Right. _Always. _So they're treating him like a criminal, so he kind of is one; so he'll think like a criminal and see what that can do. He's tied his sweatshirt in a weird knot and he's not sure how well it's doing at stopping the bleeding, but he's not looking down at the deep maps of red-rust-black creeping into cotton 'cause during all this, he's got to keep his eyes on the road or he's going to die crashing the getaway car, and that has got _no _style.

Twelve-odd years of racing games, maybe, have given him these instincts as much as anything. Turn. Gas. Brake. Turn. Go. Go. Go go go go go. _Move, move, _move—

Got to—

He is: going to a church in Nagano.

Any accomplice worth his salt makes the rendezvous, for God's sake.

--no, not God.

There's guys out there who might take a bullet for God, but he's not one of them—then again, he never really—great.

They had the guns, Takada's little minions, Matt could see that from the window of the car and (since when were you allowed to own those in Japan?) and he got out anyway and he didn't even think about it and now he's bleeding all over the place and driving and he's thinking about the pain first but he's thinking about Mello second and the third thought, woozy and annoyed, is

_what does that make me? _

By the time Matt pulls onto gravel it feels like he's lost enough blood to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool, but it's thicker than water.

There's a boxy van there, too. He hopes to hell that that belongs to Mello, otherwise he's screwed.

--yeah.

Yeah.

There he is.

Matt almost goes weak at the knees with relief, or maybe he's just weak at the knees, period. And he thinks vaguely, absurdly, _that's really an awful shirt. I mean, for—_

He just sits in the driver's seat, thinking he should move, because he's not gonna drive like this any longer. He doesn't feel like doing anything but passing out, but he knows dimly that he probably shouldn't do that yet.

_Mello—_

And there's that face in the window, full-up with point-blank relief that modified by that damn scar looks out of place and fairly weird.

"You made it," say Mello's lips through the glass.

Matt rolls down the window.

"Hey."

--Mello's eyes widen. "They shot you."

"So it would appear," says Matt, attempting sarcasm.

Something snapping, volatile, ill at ease, _concerned? _"What the hell? You did what we talked about, right, you said you were—"

"They're Kira freaks." Matt's wincing, wincing, wincing. "What'd we expect? Can I have, like, a Band-Aid or something? I think I'm gonna pass out. Can you drive?"

"Yeah," mutters Mello, who seems edgier than usual. "Yeah, sure—we've really got to get the fuck out of here. I didn't think they'd—God, I didn't—…let's go, come on." Matt sort of scooches himself over to the passenger seat, swearing like a sailor, and tries to get his sight to focus on Mello's face for a second to see if his instincts are right;

he can usually picture it without anything but sound, and sure enough, Mello looks like he sounds: pissed off and wrestling some weird conflict with a light dusting of fear. It's not like he's never seen Mello get scared before, but he usually hides it better than this, and it doesn't make Matt's focus any less unsteady. Yeah, hey. What. He trusts Mello, otherwise he'd never have pulled a stunt like this, but—

--hey, he's alive, right?

They're alive.

"You ever gonna tell me why we did this?" Matt murmurs, but Mello's answer—if there was one—is lost in the sound of the car pulling out, _vroom: _it sounds a little like a chainsaw. Figures. Mello's driving. Mello is a crazy fucking driver, but then again, so is he.

_ I should have known, _thinks Near—his hands are covered in little circles from clenching Legos so hard it was starting to hurt. The plans have been laid so carefully. If they're disturbed now…

"Hey look," Matt's saying—he's trying a smile, but it's more of a grimace. _Fuck. Ow. _"Hey. I'm a wanted man. On TV and everything. They should've gotten a better picture."

"Or not." Mello's eyes are on the road for once. He grips the steering wheel like it's a sword-hilt and he's dueling the final boss in _Ensorcelled Phalanx II. _The good guys got wounded a lot in that one, Matt remembers, stabbed with ridiculously long rapiers and shocked by lightning and set on fire—someone might've set fire to his organs; wouldn't _that _be a shocking twist.

Pictures. What does—

Oh right.

…_or not, _Matt agrees, silently.

"You shouldn't talk too much," Mello says after a pause. Tense. Ish.

"This happened to you?"

"Sure." A small half-smirk; halfhearted, lazy; that thin line. "Much easier to shoot someone once you've been shot."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Matt just listens to the radio for a while, and the throbbing in his head. –he gets a glance from Mello that's so quick—alarmed?—it's really not reassuring.

Maybe it shows.

"…You're going to be fine," adds his friend, the Mafia boss. It sounds in and out of character, really. Distant. But not. "Don't worry about it."

Matt is so willing to believe this.

_Well, _he says(?) "if _you—" _

"Take the wheel," says Mello.

…

…the fuck?

"The—"

Mello's—

Rigid. "Do it." Eyes wide and strange and disbelieving.

"What're you—"

"I--!" –shaking his head, like the sentence didn't work. That throaty voice, all fear, all anger. Vanishes. His lips mouthing the word, _Kira! _

Matt stares.

"No," he says, thinks.

Mello's face, it says in a flickering instant: _sorry _and then reaches out into fury and then—

(the car, it's not--)

(shit--)

"_Mello—" _(Mihael?)

(_this--) _

Something escapes his throat, but it's not English, it's just human, it's lost in a sound like a thousand lightbulbs getting dropped from a ninth-story window and a roaring in his ears and a ravenous burst of fire eating all the damn air--

"Near, there's a call for you."

"For L?" Near sounds distracted, almost—if he can ever sound distracted. "It can't be from Yagami, not from—"

"For you."

"Who—"

"It came through Hal's phone," says Gevanni, quietly.

One fraction of a pause.

Near says, "Transfer it" and Gevanni does, and Near presses a button to place the call on speaker.

"This is L," he says.

"Near?"

--Near freezes.

"…Matt," he says.

The voice is hoarse, shaky, clinging to static. "Takada, she—" The sound of coughing.

"Where are you?"

"I'm not sure. Few miles out—outside of Nagano."

Utter calm. "Is there anyone else with you?"

Silence.

Gevanni bites his lip.

More silence.

Near is—

"Near," says the voice, cracking and weary, "they got us."

Near swallows, once.

_Us. _

"Clarify," he says.

A sound that might be laughter, except not really—it's too strangled to be, like a sob forced through thick walls. "Kira knew h-his name, I guess."

Near says,

Near says, "What about you?"

"Takada's people shot me." Matt's closing his eyes, dizzy. Like this he can't see Mello anymore. There's a choking smell coming from the back of the van that's been smoldering since it crashed. It's so hot. There's only one thing colder than Near's voice at this point and he doesn't even want to fucking think about it. "That's all."

"You're outside of Nagano. Do you see any landmarks, or—"

"I don't see anything." He feels more of that strangled laughter burning his throat. "I think my vision's pretty much fucked."

"Stay where you are. We'll…" The rest of the sentence gets lost. Oh…oh, whatever.

He's found Mello's hand in the dark—

…_Fucker, _he's thinking, _how could you? _

"Matt."

_--sorry. Sorry. _

So since he doesn't believe in God, what's going to happen now?

"_Matt." _

_If I ever see you again, you stupid, reckless dumbass, I'll punch you in the stomach and see how much you like it. _

There's a dull ache somewhere behind his eyes, on top of everything else. Great.

He's probably going to—

"Matt!"

"—yeah?" he murmurs.

"Do as I asked you and stay where you are. Understand?"

"…'s not like I could leave," says Matt—it's barely audible over the phone, crackling and faint.

Gevanni winces, and watches Near, but Near's eyes are wide and icy and staring at some fixed point in the distance.

"How long has it been?"

"Near, you've got to—" The sound of coughing.

_Too long, _Gevanni thinks.

Near, oddly quiet: "What?"

"…just…get Kira, alright?" Anyone can hear the cracks in Matt's voice, by this point.

_He got us. Get him. _–Mello, that mess of pride and desire, he'd be disgusted, but—

If Near's all there is—

_What a thought, _Matt thinks tiredly.

…_I don't want to die like this--_

_I—_

_--dammit, I—_

_--I—_

"Matt—_Matt__—" _

_--I didn't—_

--


End file.
